Read Online Resistance by Barry Lopez - Free Book Online

same place on the two-lane macadam, a shadow in the lesser darkness with his shoulders against the sky. No one in fifty years, I guessed, had seen a plains grizzly in northeastern Montana.
    The bear did not move but faded, it and the night becoming one darkness.
    I was twenty-six then. Two years later another bear—Virgil looked over the claw marks and said this, too, was a grizzly—tore the front screen door off my place. I didn’t want to get into it with Virgil just then, about why a bear would do this, just tear the door off and leave, but I was about to get married and anxious that Jill would now be living there with me.
    I had to have an explanation from him. Virgil just shrugged. How was he to know?
    The first fall we were married I took Jill up to Lake Thibadeau for a few days. We watched ducks and geese staging for migration, bald eagles hunting the stragglers. She liked hearing the red-winged blackbirds and meadowlarks in the afternoon, those fat, bright songs. Brewer’s sparrows. We’d set our tent up on the sandy doab of an old river bar. The last morning, we got up to find fresh grizzly tracks all around. I tried to follow the bear’s trail but lost it in shallow water in both directions.
    When we got home I dropped Jill off and continued on alone another 218 miles to see Virgil. He didn’t have a phone.
    “He’s trying to get your attention, I guess,” Virgil said.
    “What do you think I should do?”
    “Pay attention.”
    “Jill is three months pregnant, Virgil, I can’t be taking any chances here,” I said.
    He looked at me the way you might someone who repeatedly draws the wrong conclusions.
    “Why don’t you come over again next week,” he said. “We’ll go back to that place up on the Porcupine, where I took you when you were a boy. We’ll look around.”
    He was telling me, so I just gave him a nod, okay.
    I had a hard time getting away. I was in court in Helena most of the week, working on a case for the Gros Ventre, arguing with ranchers who believed in a God-given right to go after a stock-killing bear, even on reservation land, and who were relentless in expressing their beliefs about the Christian foundations of our country and other assumptions which they held to be trustworthy guides to right living.
    I got to Virgil’s late on a Friday night and found him already asleep. The next morning when he woke me it was still dark. We drove the highway north. Above where Porcupine Creek crosses a dirt road we got the horses out, the buckskin for me and a blue roan mare, and then rode some miles farther north to where a mixed stand of cottonwoods and box elder stood on a river bar. It was understood Virgil would wait for me there, just as he had twenty years before.
    We both knew what this was about.
    I continued up the dry streambed toward my old campsite, packing a blanket, a tarp, a jacket, and a couple bottles of water. Virgil had not been explicit, but I knew I was to attempt again to get a vision, the image of responsibility essential, in his view, to the leading of any kind of meaningful life. The intrusion of the bear, the bear’s almost human insistence, was not lost on me; but I felt no burning need to rearrange my life to accommodate the bear. What I wanted was an explanation, a direction to head.
    It was still early when I set off up the coulee. At a place where the high bank had collapsed, I saw, not so far away, a herd of pronghorn grazing. Skittish as they are, they paid me no mind, no more attention than they’d have given a flock of birds. There were about a hundred of them, and I sat the horse awhile watching while they drifted the plain, the calves hieing up alongside their mothers whenever something in the wind or grass spooked them. Later I rode up on a badger, her new den obvious on a point bar with fresh dirt dark where she’d been digging. Like the pronghorn, she showed no alarm, but fixed me directly in her stare. About fifty feet away a coyote stood in the